2015-01-07

Having a large number of children, it is always a challenge to find time for recurring activities such as a worm farm, a compost pile, looking after the chicken or making bread everyday. The trick I sue is that anything I do on a regular basis must take no energy for getting ready and no time (ie less than 5 minutes) to complete otherwise I know it's not going to happen. So here is my 5 minutes recipe for fresh baguettes.

Step 0 - Ingredient supply.

Making bread everyday involves having an infinite supply of flour, this means I always need to check that I will have enough flour for the next couple of days. We buy organic flour by bags of 5kg and I use a container I keep on my bench top. Actually I use two container, one for plain flour and on efor wholemeal which allows me to vary the recipe from day to day. I also keep extra 1kg bag of flour in the freezer just in case I run out. You can use any type of flour but a strong flour yield better results (eg > 14KJ , high protein or high gluten)
For the raising agent I use dry yeast, the packet I keep in fridge last a very long time and I always have a spare.
Water is unlimited since I use tap water.
I like to use iodised salt, but really any table salt will do.

Step 1 - Recipe

I use an electronic scale so I can reset the tare at each step. In a large bowl add in order

7g of salt, any baby spoon will hold 7 g so I don't need to weight it

550 to 570g of water depending on my mood or how much fall in the bowl

700g of flour (I use a mix of 200g wholemeal and 500g plain, but anything will do, you can even mix other types of grain as well, the more the wholemeal, the more water you need)

Mix until you have a big homogenous blob, cover with a wet towel, wait a few hours (overnight is fine on the kitchen counter)

Step 2 - Cooking

preheat oven to maximum temp

put flour on workbench, empty dough on flour, cut in 4, shape the dough in baguette, put on baking tray, put a bit of oil on baking tray first if you think it's sticky

spray baguettes with water to wet extra flour

cut bread with knife/scissors to make pretty marking on bread and avoiding it to crack while cooking

put tray in oven, lower temp to 220C (fan forced), throw half a glass of water at the bottom of the oven (this help with the crust)

wait 14 minutes (might be longer, depending on the oven)

It happens form time to time that I forget something, if it's the yeast, we get flat bread, which taste like a brick, but the kids love it. If I forget the salt, the bread is tasteless, but you can butter it up.

For a long time I wasn't very consistent with my open source code hosting. But the past couple years, all the rage is happening on github.com. That's where I put all my open source contribution past and present.

The most active one (ie the one I get the most support request) is the crowd nexus plugin which is a fork form the sonatype plugin they stopped supporting with nexus 1.8 for commercial reasons. And that's fair enough, if you pay for your authentication provider you should pay for the tools using it as well. In my case I got interested in this project to allow my colleagues to keep using Nexus OSS while using crowd. Nexus OSS usage was well established, but management was not yet ready to pay for the commercial version with a weird pricing model.